Product Operations
As a product leader at Cox Enterprises, I have helped innovate our organization’s culture, agile process, and structure through proactive proposals intended to challenge ourselves to work smarter and increase value delivery while staying within the limitations of the organization’s budgets.
I helped transform the CMG Product Management organization from a medium-specific model (News Talk Radio, Music Radio, T.V. Broadcast, Newspaper) that developed duplicative products to a centralized product team model. The model change enabled the delivery of value across mediums by adopting a create once, use everywhere mentality.
At CMG, I also led the effort to introduced SAFe Portfolio Management, including a lean business case approval and value-based prioritization process implemented in JIRA and included weekly automated flow reports.
At The AJC, I designed and built up a 15 person product development team from the ground-up, and positioned the organization for faster value delivery by democratizing decision making via a culture shift towards experimentation.
Cox Media Group: One-Product Team
This was a self-initiated proposal for a significant organizational change while working at Cox Enterprises in the Cox Media Group division. I put this recommendation forward in Jan ‘18 to build momentum towards a restructure we needed to tackle. I socialized the ideas represented in this pitch deck internally and was able to help gain buy-in from key internal stakeholders. The model was adopted.
Once we established the Centralized Product Team, and I had done some work to understand better what was pragmatic, it was clear that the SAFe Portfolio layer would bring immediate value to CMG. Like any good product rollout, we started with an MVP (our lean business case was a word document) and quickly moved everything into our cloud-based work management platform, JIRA.
The final process we adopted in Jira Atlassian is reflected here:
Divestiture: Building a Product Development Team in 30 days
Cox Enterprises divested Cox Media Group in 2019, with a few key brand exceptions: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, DawgNation, and Ohio Newspapers (the company origins are with Dayton Daily News). Due to FCC regulations on the transaction, there were several restrictions around planning and communication surrounding how the retained brands would establish stand-alone teams and transition to a completely new and fully stand-alone technical ecosystem.
I was asked to lead the Product Development Team, build it from the ground up, and be fully accountable for the technical, operational aspects of the successful separation of the retained brands from Cox Media Group within timelines that the FCC established.
We had 30 days to recruit, hire, and onboard the core team members on the Product Development Team. We had 6 months to complete 80% of the separation of core platform in our technical ecosystem with an additional 3 months for the remaining 20% long-pole items under the terms of the negotiated Transition Services Agreement (TSA).
It was a tall “ask” of the team, but everyone we onboarded was bought into the mission of supporting journalism and was ready to lean in. We hit every milestone and maintained focus on keeping the team happy and engaged. Since the team’s inception 2 years ago, we have not had anyone leave. It’s a solid team, working together towards a shared vision and mission, helping each other as needed along the way. Our mindset is that the whole is bigger than the individual.
As Sr. Director of Product Management at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I championed the democratization of decisions based on experimentation and data vs. top-down prescriptive decisions based on personal opinions.
Continuous Experimentation (CE) is an integral component of agile product development. Great products are the result of experimentation and collaboration, with a cycle of feedback and improvement.
Experimentation unlocks real-world insights into customer behavior. It is essential always to test assumptions – because the clear answer is not always the correct answer.